


Unsent

by Roses



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection, POV First Person, Present Tense, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-17
Updated: 2010-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:59:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roses/pseuds/Roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepherd is still coming to terms with the fact that she's been dead for two years, and starting to accept that it has drawn a line through her life that she will never cross back over. When Kaidan sends her a message in the aftermath of everything that happened on Horizon, she sits down to write back to him... even if she knows he'll never read it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unsent

When I was a little girl growing up on Mindoir, I used to dream about sleeping underneath a window that looked up into the stars. It was a beautiful place back then, before the batarians came. I don't imagine that there's much of it left now. Events like that don't just scar the people that live through them, they scar the land.

Maybe it's just that, since it happened, I've not been able to look at it in the same way again.

Mindoir feels like a different place now. Tainted.

I loved growing up there. Sure, it was a backwater on the front line, and we were living under the constant threat of attack, but I was a child. I was too young to know any better. I used to lie in my bed at night and stare up at that ceiling, thinking about the night sky above me. Thinking about the stars, and thinking about the day when I would be able to get up there among them. It wasn't like I was unhappy with what I had, just that there always seemed to be _so much more out there_. Like there was so much beauty and wonder in the universe, and one day I knew that I would go out there and see as much of it as I could before I died.

Little did I know, right?

I'm probably the only woman in the universe that's going to get to die _twice_.

Mindoir is right on the cusp of a nebula, and the stars there are like nothing you will have ever seen before--growing up on an Alliance ship, cut loose into the sky, or down on Earth where there is so much light pollution that you can barely see the stars at all.

On Mindoir, the stars are afloat in an ocean of liquid fire--reds and blues, greens and purples. All the colours of the nebula, with a few, bright points of light pressing their way through the haze.

I can remember the sky on Akuze, too. I remember crawling my way out of the ditch where the rest of my team were dead or dying, and looking up at the cold, dead clouds hanging above me.

Akuze was always a shithole, and I've already spent too much of my life reliving what happened down there. It's funny, but what happened on the Citadel, what's happening right now, none of it gets to me the same way as Akuze. Maybe I've just gotten older. More cynical.

Oh, Kaidan, but you should be here with me. They rebuilt the _Normandy_. Did they tell you about that? Now the universe is ending, and the only thing that I can think about is how much I wish that I could show you it.

Cerberus has given me my own space up in the loft. It's too big for me, really. Too comfortable. Too _civilian_. Clean in the way that only a shitload of private investment can make it clean. But do you know what? After all of this time, they've given me what I've wanted all along: A room under the stars.

There's a viewport directly over my bed, and when I lie down and switch the lights off I can see the stars moving through the void behind the _Normandy_ 's shields. Like ribbons of blue light. Stars pressing through an ocean of blue fire.

It's just like being back at home.

Christ. Two years. What can I even say to you after all that time? What do I say that makes those last two years any better?

I can't, can I?

No one can.

Right now I'm just so damned _angry_. Angry at the Collectors for ripping our ship apart, for killing me and breaking up our team, sure, but it's more than that. The Collectors will get what's coming to them. I know that in every fibre of my being. It is the one certainty that I have left.

That knowledge must dull the blade a little. I can't think of any other reason why I'd be so pissed off at Cerberus, at the other biotics that we've picked up that are supposed replace you, at... Well, I guess at the whole fucking universe.

I'm angry because I never asked for all of this. I never wanted to be a hero, a paragon for humanity, a great warrior putting her life on the line for everything that is good and righteous in this galaxy. Maybe you do. Maybe that's why you signed up with the Alliance, but not me. Hell, I just did it because there was nothing left for me on Mindoir and the sky was out there, calling. I just wanted to get out there and see the galaxy, live well, and die when I was ready. And maybe I would have done it, too. God knows that it's only the unnatural ability not to get myself killed that's stopped me. The Alliance just threw me at bigger and bigger problems, waiting to find something that would finally kill me off. They never did.

 _I_ never did.

I couldn't tell you why.

This is going to sound crazy, but sometimes... I don't know. Religion is like a drug, isn't it? Some people use it as a crutch, some people use it like a weapon. A few people try to use it to help make things a little better, but they're usually the first ones to get hit when the revolution comes. I've been dead for two years and I never saw anything that would make me think that there was any kind of 'higher power' out there.

And yet... And yet sometimes I have to wonder if there is something else out there in the space between the stars. Something that's been looking out for me. I survived what the batarians did to my parents on Mindoir. I survived what the Alliance tried to do to me on Akuze. I survived getting hit in the head by a Prothean beacon on Eden Prime...

Thanks for that one, by the way. I know you beat yourself up pretty bad for getting me into that whole mess, but you needn't have worried. We didn't even know each other then. It was kind of you to care.

...I survived Saren, Sovereign and the attack on the Citadel (with a little help from you, and Garrus, and Tali) and now...

...And now this.

_Maybe the dead are the lucky ones._

That's one of those cheap comforts that they hand out at times like this, isn't it? Tell us all that the dead have it easy, and it's the living that have to suffer. Well, let me tell you something: I've lived through those times when everyone else has been killed in front of me, and being dead is worse.

Two years of my life... Of _our_ lives just...

I want to say that I wish they hadn't brought me back, and yet... And yet there is a window full of stars above my bed, and the universe is still out there, Kaidan. Calling to me. I haven't had enough of it yet. And I am _not_ ready to die.

I find beauty in other places now. There's this nightclub on Omega: Afterlife. Thinking about it, maybe it's a fitting place for me. It's run by this asari crimelord called Aria, and there's just something about that place that whispers to me. I still daydream too much. After spending all that time on Omega, I started thinking that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad place for me to live, once all of this is over.

I never wanted to be a hero.

Don't get me wrong, there are things I love about where I am right now. The _Normandy_. _My_ ship. _My_ people. Being a Spectre means that I can go wherever I want. Do whatever I want. Like the asari Justicars. I don't think I'd mind being one of them, either. Having my freedom means more to me than anything.

Than almost anything.

But, you know, if someone offered me obscurity tomorrow? I would take it with both hands. A part of me is still nursing the fantasy that when all of this is over, maybe Aria will ask me to work for her. I think that I'd be happy like that: Spending the rest of my life as a hired gun. It'd get messy, sure. I'd get my hands dirty. But the universe is always going to be a messy place, Kaidan. And we can only do the best we can with what we have.

And so I daydream about coming back to Omega. About not having to deal with the Collectors, or the Reapers, or the Council, or the Alliance. I guess that, in a way, I dream about it because I can't quite bring myself to dream about the kind of life that you and I might...

No.

After everything that you said on Horizon, after your letter, I can't...

Christ, Kaidan, but you've moved on. You're seeing someone else now. And I know you say it isn't serious, but in time these things might...

I wish that I could send this to you. Hope that you cared enough for it to matter. But...

But I'm about to throw myself into the void. We're going to go through the Omega 4 Relay, and no one has ever come back from that. I don't know what we're going to find out on the other side.

If I sent this to you now, then how do I know that you won't have to spend the _next_ two years of your life getting over me again? I don't. I can't. No one seems to be holding out much hope that we'll survive this, and no matter how much I might want you here with me...

Damn it, Kaidan. I can't do that to you.

I love you.

_You don't know what you have until you lose it._

That's another of those little sympathies they give you, isn't it? The little lie. One of those platitudes that's meant to get you through life and out somewhere on the other side. They little lies have always seemed hollow to me somehow. Pointless.

I'm just going to say that I miss you.

God only knows that I miss you.

If Garrus wasn't here to catch me when I slipped up, to keep me on the straight and narrow as best he can, and pick me up off of the bathroom floor when I get too drunk stand... Then I don't know what I would have done. I owe that ugly bastard more than I will ever tell him.

More than he will ever know.

You're right. We have changed. Both of us. I guess I'm hoping that you're only clinging to the Alliance because you don't have anything better to cling onto. Because you'd lost everything better when you lost the _Normandy_.

The Alliance is flawed, Kaidan. She is rotten to her core. It all is. We came out into this great, bright sea of stars, and everything that we have built is poison. Our entire galactic society is founded on something that's rotten.

We picked up a geth on a derelict Reaper ship in the Hawking Eta, orbiting Mnemosyn. He's different from the ones we saw on Eden Prime. He calls the ones that sided with Saren and the Reapers 'heretics', and he said something to me that's stuck with me.

He said that the geth build their own future on their own choices. That the heretics left because they wanted to rely on the Reapers to advance them. That they had fallen into the same trap that we have done: Allowing Reaper technology to guide us along the path that they intended for us.

Our entire civilisation is founded on their technology. It's a tool that they are using to manipulate, and destroy, us. Do you really think that all of this just goes away without us giving any of that up? When the first mass effect relay was found on Charon, we learned to use it, to adapt our lives around it, and now we're stuck at the end of the line that the Reapers have laid out for us and every other intelligent civilisation in the last who-only-knows how long. There is this small, dark voice right at the very back of my mind that keeps saying that Legion is right: That unless we can abandon Reaper technology and find out how to do these things our own way, then we will never escape them.

I know that there's no point in me even thinking about it. Everything that we went through with Saren taught me that there are some things in this world that you can't change. You just have to do the best you can with what you have, right?

And right now, I have the _Normandy_ , and that will have to be enough.

I think it's natural for people to feel connected with the spaces they exist in. Lying in the dust on Akuze and looking up at the ribbed bands of cloud across that sky, I felt connected to it. The planet was cold and dead and dusty, and there I was: Exactly the same as it. It felt as though we were the same thing, somehow. As though we were made out of the same matter. The same energy.

Maybe I've just been through one too many joinings with the asari.

It's that same feeling that I used to get when I'd lie in my bedroom on Mindoir and stare up at the ceiling—dreaming about the vastness and wonder of the sky. It's the same feeling that I get now when I put my head down in my rack, and let the blue lights of the _Normandy_ 's shields scroll over me as I fall sasleep.

She and I... We are cut from the same metal. We're made from the same blood.

She saw us through it all when Sovereign attacked the Citadel. She fought, and sweated and burned and survived, just like I did, and when she fought the Collectors and failed, and died, she died with me. Only now Cerberus have rebuilt us both: Filled us up with wires and technology that we didn't want or ask for, and made us run on circuit-boards where we were once fuelled by blood and oil.

I don't want to think about the fact that I'm more machine than human. I pretend it isn't happening. Pretend that I can't see the light burning through the holes that they left in my face, or feel the heat of the relays overloading every time I lose my temper. I'm not really human any more. I don't know what I am. I don't know how to deal with that, so right now I don't deal with it at all. Try not to have thoughts like: What happens if I die again? Can I grow old? If I decide that I want kids one day, is that even possible? Can the Collectors just hack into me the same way that they hacked into the _Normandy_? Am I alive? Am I the same person that I was two years ago?

Those questions are too big for me. I'm just some soldier girl from Mindoir who is batting way above her pay grade, and has no idea why.

Hell, Kaidan, I hope that the drinks that you're having with this doctor on the Citadel turn into something more. That she's good to you. That you're happy. And that, if I don't come back from this, then the day comes when you don't think about me too much. I'm not going to give you any bullshit about how you're better off without me, or how you deserve better. It isn't true. But you deserve to be happy, and with the way my life is going, I'm not sure that I can give you that.

Doesn't change the fact I want to.

Still, I know that if I live through this then I'm not going to do the 'right thing', I'm not going to leave you alone and hope that you can keep yourself alive and happy. Maybe then I'll send you this letter, or maybe I'll go one better and just find out where the hell the Alliance have you stationed, and come and see you. Talk to you. Find out where we stand, and what we're going to do. Maybe then I'll even let myself daydream about going back to Mindoir... and showing you what that burning ocean of stars looks like from the ground.

Shit. This has turned out to be about ten times longer than the message you sent me, and I _still_ haven't I've said everything I want to say. I guess I always did like talking more than you did.

It doesn't matter. You won't read this.

I'll just go through that relay the happier knowing it's been said.

Take care of yourself, Kaidan. At least until I get back to help you out with that one.


End file.
